The natural order of things

It is sometimes worth considering the natural order of things and why we do the things we do.

One does not do something to be happy – one IS happy and does something to express it. One does not do something to be ethical – one IS ethical and does something to express those ethical ideals. We don’t need someone else to tell us – this is just part of the natural order of things.

Just take what I heard today. I heard that the owner and founder of the company I work for, an old man, had died. I only met him once and he seemed nice enough but there has been no ‘official’ communication. There was a rumour which a friend of a friend ‘confirmed’. This is just not good enough. While I appreciate the privacy, the grief and the sensitivities of the family, surely there is a responsibility to the employees to keep them in the ‘loop’ as it were, and to keep them informed? I would not have expected a ‘daily bulletin’, or anything of that nature, but something to let me know would have been welcome. I mean I am supposed to be part of a ‘team’ – or so I am told. Not much evidence of this now, is there? But they obviously have their reasons.

Enough of this negativity! I need to move on and thinking of this man’s death leads me to the subject of symbols and rituals. We use them all the time. A symbol is something we use to explain the inexplicable. It is something which our family, or group, or society use to mean something that everyone in the family, group or society understands but cannot really explain. Seeing that a death initiated all this lets use a flame by way of example. Most Western cultures have a ‘Tomb to the Unknown Warrior’ with the symbol of an ‘eternal flame’. To me this symbolises the sacrifice that soldiers make; it symbolises the ‘eternal’ life that can never be fully extinguished while there are people to remember; it symbolises the funeral pyre and is of really ancient origin; it also symbolises the ‘unity’ of Man – that we are all the same – all part of the human race – that the ‘unknown warrior’ is a part of us all.

A ritual on the other hand is used to express the inexpressible and may be a physical event or something we may verbalise – “I wash my hands of you!”- I am no longer concerned about you. Then there are the well known ‘universal’ rituals of Easter and Christmas – the Easter bunny - the hoped for fertility in the growing season of Spring (Northern Hemisphere) and the giving of presents – celebrating the birth of the new year and the return of the sun (again originally a Northern Hemisphere ritual) now taken over by Christianity.

These are just some of the things we find difficult to explain or express and yet they are part of our lives and some are remnants of a half remembered ancient past when Nature, the ebb and flow of the tides and the cycle of the seasons had a deeper meaning than it does for us city dwellers of today. I know there are many other examples of symbols and rituals used by many people around the world.

This is all as it should be and is part of the natural order of things, at least I consider it so. Symbols and rituals help us make sense of the world in our own way.